Backend Engineer (Coding Agent Experience)

**About the Role** \- Mercor is partnering with a leading AI research lab to support a Frontier Code Agents project. \- Contributors help evaluate and improve frontier AI coding models through structured technical assessments. \- The work focuses on realistic software engineering workflows and model evaluation rather than traditional software development. \- Spots are limited and filling quickly on a first come, first serve basis. **What You'll Do** \- Use frontier AI coding agents to complete and evaluate complex engineering tasks. \- Review model-generated code for correctness, quality, maintainability, and performance. \- Identify bugs, edge cases, and failure modes in model outputs. \- Compare outputs from multiple frontier models and assess their strengths and weaknesses. \- Apply professional engineering judgment to realistic backend engineering scenarios. **Time Commitment** \- Sprint based project that runs in 12-24 hour stretches based on client requirement. **Compensation** \- $400 per accepted task. \- Typical tasks take approximately 2–3 hours after ramp-up. \- Compensation is tied to accepted work. **Who Should Apply** \- 2+ years of professional backend engineering experience. \- Experience building APIs, distributed systems, microservices, backend platforms, or databases. \- Regular use of AI coding agents such as Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Windsurf, Gemini CLI, or similar tools. \- Ability to evaluate model-generated code and identify bugs, edge cases, and architectural tradeoffs. \- Experience working on large-scale production systems is preferred.